Violence and related human rights abuses against women fleeing the war in Ukraine

This project will interview women who have arrived in the EU from Ukraine as a consequence of Russia’s war of aggression about their experiences, including violence and other human rights abuses related to the conflict. The data collected will contribute to efforts to better respond to the needs of women displaced by armed conflict.
Project Status
Ongoing
Project start date
May
2023

What?

The project will interview women who have arrived in the EU from Ukraine as a consequence of Russia’s war of aggression. The women will be asked about their experiences, including violence and other human rights abuses related to the conflict. The face-to-face interviews will take place in three EU Member States – Czechia, Germany and Poland, which are among the countries in the EU that have received the largest number of persons displaced by the war. The data collected will contribute to efforts to better respond to the needs of women displaced by armed conflict.

Why?

As a result of the devastating war, an unprecedented number of women have fled their homes in Ukraine to seek safety in the EU. These women are in need of protection and assistance – including services which are afforded to victims of crime according to the Victims’ Rights Directive. The data collected in the project will contribute to a better understanding of the experiences and needs of women who have fled the war in Ukraine and who may have experienced violence and other human rights abuses while in Ukraine, during their journey to the EU and after arriving to their current place of residence in the EU.

How?

The project will interview women who have fled the war in Ukraine and are now residing in one of the three EU Member States where the interviews will be conducted. The interviews will ask women about their experiences in Ukraine during the war, in transit and in their current country of residence, including their experiences of violence and exploitation, awareness and use of support services and service needs. Where relevant, the project aims to collect data that is comparable with other surveys that have collected data on violence against women – including FRA’s 2012 survey on violence against women, surveys on conflict-related violence against women carried out by the OSCE (including data collection in Ukraine in 2018), the European survey on gender-based violence against women and other forms of interpersonal violence (EU-GBV survey) and the 2023 FRA-EIGE survey on violence against women.

See also